24. Snap, Save, Savor 😎 Easy Photo Organization Tips for Family Vacations

In this month's episode I'm breaking down my favorite ways to save summer memories with 10 Easy Photo Organization Tips for Family Vacations.

You can catch the full show notes with links discussed in this episode here

Transcript

Oh hey guys It's me. I'm still in my car. It is still summer in the northeast here in Massachusetts. We are still doing all the things, all the driving around, all the summer vacations in between. And I was going to do this the official way with my podcast mic at my desk. But I decided not to. I needed to just pull over back in my podcast park in in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

It's beautiful. And I said, you know what? Forget it. We're just going to record the podcast that I'm thinking about today. And we're just doing it. I looked at some of the analytics and it looked like a lot of you listened to my last episode. So I guess you don't care if this is perfect or not. So I think you more care about the information I'm sharing.

Okay. Today I wanted to drop in with some hot takes on how to save your summer and save your memories that you've created this year. What I've found from going on vacation this summer and in past summers, and from talking to my friends about their process from what they do with their photos after the vacations, I think it's important that we have this chat today about some ways that you can make printing books from the past.

your vacations easy or creating albums on your phone so that you can find pictures from your vacations really fast. So  in a quick and dirty way, we're going to just jump right in. So my first tip for you is if you are going on a vacation this summer and it's something that you do every year. So for example, we go to New Hampshire every year and we go to the Cape.

pretty often. I like to create an album on my phone that says New Hampshire 2024 or Cape 2024 or whatever it is. I like to say the location in the year so that I can quickly dump my favorite photos in there. When I'm on vacation, I'm usually in a Mode of taking pictures of the fun things that are happening.

I'm trying to document places that we've gone to some of the activities that we're doing and noticing the joy that just like lights up on my kids faces when, especially when they see the ocean. I think that they have the same reaction I do when we see the ocean or when our feet touch the water.

So I like to get photos of that. And at the end of the night, While I'm on vacation, instead of scrolling Instagram, I scroll my camera roll and go through and do my daily delights. I've talked about this before in the podcast and I will link that episode in the show notes. If I did make a full episode on it, it should be all about daily delights, but basically it's where you go through your camera roll and you heart your favorites and then zoom out and delete all the rest.

So it's a quick way to start taking control over your camera roll in the process, while you're in the thick of it, taking all the pictures, but it gives you a chance to get control over some of the clutter that comes in between. So, Every night when I'm going through and doing my daily delights, I like to take those hearts and if I'm in the moment and I want to, I can add them right to that album for the vacation that we're on, or I wait till the drive home or the plane ride home and use that time to go through all of the all of my favorite images and videos and select just the ones with the hearts and click the add to album button and add them right to that vacation album.

If I've gone on vacation with a group of friends like we do in New Hampshire, there are several people that we like to share photos back and forth with. So I'll create shared albums on iPhone using iCloud and I will add those images to that shared album and then add my friends. phone numbers to it so that they can join the album.

They can upload their pictures if they want or they can download and use mine from there. They're not the highest quality images, but they're more than perfect for what we're all doing everything for. I've used shared images before to download and print in photo books and because I'm not printing my photo books bigger than really like 10 by 10 ever these photo sizes are perfectly fine from a shared album.

That, when you use a shared album, it doesn't take up your iCloud storage. So if you're running low on iCloud storage, it's a great way to help  use the free storage that you get from Apple by using the shared album. Otherwise just make an album on your phone. And it's a great way to start sorting one cool trick that I learned a couple of weeks ago when we talked with Miss Freddie I'll link that to in the show notes for you.

If you want to go back and listen to some of her tips, she had a great way of using folders inside apple photos. So if you ever manage your photo collections on the computer and have a Mac computer and you're running apple photos program, you can create folders. inside inside Apple Photos and then move albums into those folders.

So, for us, when we go to the same place every year, I could take all of our New Hampshire Beach photos from every year and add those albums into the New Hampshire Beach Photos folder, and then buy a year from there. Which would be a really fun way to be able to quickly go back and see the growth that's happened over the years.

So, yeah. And it's just a quick way to access your photos.  Some, my next part that I want to move into is sharing some tips and tricks for accessing your photos quickly. I have seen a lot of people this summer post that they are just so overwhelmed by their 20, 000 pictures in their camera roll and they don't know where to start and how are they going to get them all organized and it's just impossible.

And I'm here to tell you that you're never going to get them all the way fully organized. If you keep taking pictures and if you don't spend the time to sit down and tackle organization I don't think as busy moms that we actually have the time to devote to fully organizing everything just so and Technology is evolving very fast and it's really helping us find pictures we need and want to find just by using keywords.

AI inside Apple Photos and in Google Photos can search your images by descriptive words. Like, it can know that I'm right now sitting In a flower garden, if I just typed up flower, it will pull up all these images of flowers. And I might be able to find the picture I took just now of where I'm sitting while I record this podcast.

Even though I've tagged nothing about it, I haven't told them where I am, I can just use the simple search term flower and it might pull that up. So I want to take away if I can possibly do that in this episode. Take away some of that mom guilt and shame that people feel that they don't have a fully organized and curated collection of images and that they have 20, 000 images on their iPhone.

I. See it. More want you to focus on tackling one thing at a time. So a very easy and tangible way to do this is when I go on that trip and I'm taking, for example, we're just going to keep using New Hampshire. If I take my New Hampshire photos and put them in an album, I can then, if I have extra time, go back and search 2023  New Hampshire and like try to find where I was in New Hampshire and around the date that we were there.

And Find those photos, collect them, add them into a 2023 New Hampshire album and put that in the New Hampshire photo photos folder album. So I can just use guideposts of like certain vacations we're on to go back years past to get those photos organized. Another fun trick that I've heard is that people will.

Try to start organizing their photos or like deleting screenshots and trying to favorite their photos from years past by doing it daily and going from today. So today's date is, let's just say, I think it's August 15th. God knows what day it is. August 15th. I could go from today at the end of the day, I can go through my phone and heart all my favorites from today.

Delete the rest. Then I can type in August 15th, 2023, go back and look at all the photos I took last year on that day and heart my favorites, delete the rest. I can then go August 20 15th, 2022, and so on. Do the same process and start whittling down some pictures each day that way. And if you're not perfect with it and don't do it every day it's something that,  You're making tiny bits of progress by doing something and if that's something that's helpful for you to like Start feeling like you're making momentum and start doing something with your photos so that you can see Some of these memories you've created and see some of the joy that exists amidst the chaos I just I hope that helps you.

So give it a try this year the last thing I want to talk about so I guess it's like Really three hot takes is where we're at. The last thing I want to talk about is doing something with your photos, okay? I know everybody wants to do something with their photos. Everybody messages me saying that they wanted to make their baby book five years ago.

They wanted to make that special trip book, and they have it. How about this year, I challenge you to just do the damn thing? I am guilty. I haven't made a photo album in probably two to three years. I know it takes some time to do it, but they don't have to be perfect. And we need to just, if that's something that's burning in your heart to have, we need to sit down and do it.

I am going to sit down and do it because I feel like people That is something that's been missing lately with my family is we've loved looking at our photo albums in the past and I see the joy that fills my kids faces when they like look back at pictures of themselves when they were little and compare themselves to each other and how they've grown.

Like, I know how much connection that it brings.  I want to do that again. So I'm like saying this into the ethos so that maybe you can ping me and hold me accountable being like, here, where's your photobook? So I'm hoping that in the next, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say by October, mid October, I need to have one made for at a minimum this summer.

So I got one more big trip coming up that I want to complete for the summer. So I got, I can give myself some grace on starting that book yet, but I do think it'll be fun.  One of my most favorite ways to make a summer photo album is to just really summarize the trips that we made and take some of the best of photos from each.

I don't want every photo of everything we ever did at each of the places. I just want some of those key highlights that like stick out in my mind that I want to remember about what we did. It's fun to ask your kids what their favorite parts of the trips were. I always laugh cause my kids are like.

Oh, I loved Finding a Frog. Like, they didn't care that we just spent 400 to go pet animals at a zoo. Like,  they were more excited that they saw a frog hop through the parking lot. So, if you have a picture of that actually might be worth more money and gold in your kids minds to put that photo in the album than  being at the zoo when everybody was hot and everybody was melting down.

So it doesn't have to be perfect. It needs to just be something that lights you up and follow that as your guiding light for how you're putting these things together.  my favorite place to print my photo books for summer vacation books. I love pinhole press. I still love pinhole press. I love chat books.

And I'm going to go back and try Artifact Uprising. I think again, I just saw some books made from there and they look just, they do look so pretty. They are a bit more expensive and they don't hold up super well to kids playing with them. So, I might not use it for one of these books that I know is going to get a lot of use.

Pinhole Press is great for that. Their pages are durable, they're sturdy, they can withstand being looked at and tossed around a bit. And they have all sorts of range of budgets, so you could do like a board book, like if you have young kids toddler age that want to toss it around, they just have a spiral bound board book that, You can toss in a diaper bag or toss in a, toss anywhere and they hold up pretty well.

And they're like 30, 40 bucks. So they're a fun way to just take maybe 12 pictures and be like, summer fun and just have a couple pictures of the kids doing some fun things. So  lots of cool ideas in my head. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast in a car episode number two. Maybe this becomes a thing.

I don't know. But.  I just want to get this information out to you guys and I want to support you  on your quest to make some memories and make something of those damn memories. So  hang in there guys. Okay, this last part I'm going to give you a little bit of a call to action here.  If you want something to download for a family yearbook checklist that I've used in the past to start documenting what's been going on in our year and what I might want to put in our album.

I have a really fun checklist I use and I can show you a little walkthrough of a family album that we've made recently. It's a free thing that you can just download. I'm going to attach that in the show notes so that you can check that out. And then get ready because Memory Maker's Masterclass is coming back, yo.

I'm speaking this into the university too because I am shifting things from how it was in the past and we're going to move forward with basically a busy mom's guide to photo organization and no bullshit way of tackling your photos. So  I think I want to provide a roadmap for people who just don't know what to do and keep beating themselves up because they've done nothing.

And I want to help people get over this guilt and actually do something. Even if it's small steps and it's not fully perfect all the way done. So, you can have a lot of progress by and confidence in yourself and peace of mind knowing that your photos are organized. If you do a few simple steps and  I'm bringing that to the world through the new version of Memory Maker's Master Class, which is probably called Busy's Guide, whatever I just said before.

I like that. So let me know if you have any ideas, if any of this resonates with you. I'm basically doing this myself with my brain and I love hearing back from you guys and getting feedback. So hit me up on DMs on Instagram, download that freebie, yo, it's going to be helpful for you and keep on listening and thanks for being here.

Love you guys. Bye.